Teletext found on G-19 bird!!

[N5XZS]

After all these years since last time I saw teletext in 1982 London UK on BBC 1, well I found the teletext but not in English though.

What is teletext? It's a electronic newspaper before the Internet came out in full force in the mid 90's.

Here's the information's...

G-19 bird at 97w*

RTS Sat "PTC"

Freq, 12.060 GHz, H 22MBs, Video format 480i 16:9 WS

DVB-S QPSK, the signal quality here in New Mexico is at 74% nice strong signal

So far no English language on teletext though but I will keep looking for it!

 

[Brct203]

Nice find!
And yes that's a throwback to the 80's and 90's! I remember the teletext on most European channels back then. When satellite TV introduced channels aimed at several countries with different languages, they would use teletext subtitles to provide subtitles in the various languages.

Interestingly, RTS SAT is on 2 different transponders on 97W but only the one you mention has the teletext.

I have also seen teletext signal on Canal Plus HD on 34.5 Ku (lower Ku) when it's broadcasting unencrypted (usually twice a day for about 1 hr) ( i don't know if you can receive it in NM). But I don't think there was any actual teletext content.

One thing that is surprising, about RTS, since it's from Serbia, they use the Cyrillic alphabet (PTC spells RTS in Cyrillic letters), however the teletext content appears to be all in Latin alphabet.

 

[northgeorgia]

For those that would like to try it out, the Amiko Mini HD RE has this feature. Go to the channel, press TTX at the bottom of the remote, and select "English" (although it's really Serbian). You can navigate via the color coded menu buttons indicated on the screen, the up and down arrows, the keypad, and "OK." If you click OK repeatedly without selecting anything, it will go cycle from black screen through various degrees of transparency to the RTS Sat channel being displayed. There is a program schedule for the channel on the Teletext. The program can also be recorded and teletext accessed via playback. Enjoy learning Serbo-Croat!

 

[Keith Brannen]

Great find!

Finally get to check out teletext on the AZBox. Interesting that they have a wide selection of soccer league results/tables, as well as having the NBA!

Reminds me of the early 80's when our cable system had a text loop of news, sports, and weather. Of course, that one you had to wait the 10 or 15 minutes for it to loop back to the item you just missed! LOL! As well, if you left it on the channel too long, too many times, it would slowly burn into your CRT TV!

 

[N5XZS]

I wonder if we could build a 2nd generation Teletext for DVB FTA, and ATSC 3.0 by relieving the Internet traffic overload. Since it's one way broadcast to everyone's households by satellite and terrestrial TV "OTA".

With new better graphics and photos to be had with!!

The world has changes so much since the 80's and the 90's,so why not give the Teletext a new fresh look?

 

[kofi123]

One thing that is surprising, about RTS, since it's from Serbia, they use the Cyrillic alphabet (PTC spells RTS in Cyrillic letters), however the teletext content appears to be all in Latin alphabet.

Serbia uses both scripts and people there are expected to fully understand both. The government considers Cyrillic official though, which is why RTS prefers that, but even on their website you can freely switch between Cyrillic and Latin depending on your preference.

 

[lost_mesa]

Great find N5XZS! Nice to see some teletext again here in North America.

It's working well here on a V7 and also with SmartDVB. SmartDVB is FAST. It appears to download and save all the pages, giving instant access. No waiting for a page to be transmitted. Page numbers can be entered numerically and there is also some limited cursor and mouse functionality for navigating through pages.

BITD, there where two competing teletext formats in North America. I had decoders for both formats.

WTBS carried a service called Electra. It used the World System Teletext format, same format as we are seeing here on G19. My decoder was a kit from Dick Smith Electronics. It was built around a pre-assembled module. Zenith sold some TVs with built in WST decoders. I think 2 or 3 OTA stations also had some local teletext service, but Electra on WTBS was the only one I could get.

The other format was called North America Broadcast Teletext Specification. It was supposedly capable of much higher graphics resolution than the WST standard, but I never saw that capability used. CBC, NBC and CBS used this system. By the time I found an affordable Panasonic decoder on the surplus market, only the CBS ExtraVison service was left. My local CBS station didn't carry it, so CBS on C Band was my only source. ExtraVison ended sometime in the mid to late 80s.

Kind of a cool and little known technology back then, at least here in the U.S. If its obscurity hadn't killed it, the internet would have.

Screen capture from G19:

 

[N5XZS]

Lost Mesa, Yes I remember on 2 formats they used at the time here in North America. Back in the 80's KGGM-TV, at the time try to carry CBS ExtraVison but thanks due to hard of hearing and deaf community want's to carry CC "Closed Captioning so KGGM-TV decided to drop the CBS teletext system in favor of CC. They try to local news in sign language, but not very practical at that time did not last very long since the hearing people complained about it.

Even though I am hard of hearing, I preferred teletext over CC system since it's has all the package's plus the subtitle.

Did you know the CC semi teletext is very crude using RTTY style mostly used by ABC CBC and PBS for program information's and not much on news stuff...

Btw, KGGM-TV is the old call letter in Albuquerque, KRQE-DT is the current call letter.

 

[N5XZS]

Here's more useful information's on Teletext...

Teletext - Wikipedia

Enjoy!!

 

[Gulcher]

Cool!

 

[N5XZS]

Now I wonder how much it cost and maintain the Teletext on with the FTA satellite dealers ads and any other hobbies like ham radio, scanner radios and or any kind of ads?

You can add on news, weather, sport and hobbyist stuff of course we need to piggyback on some satellite TV stations on Ku band thinks that's a good idea to you?

 

[iBoston]

That is awesome! I tuned to it today... I thought it was a 1 page thing, but there are pages and pages of information that you can jump through. You can use the red/green/yellow/blue keys to jump to different categories. Very cool. This is the first experience with TeleText.

Thanks for the post... I'm gonna play with this some more.. Too bad it's not in English!!!

I used to run a BBS back in the early 90's. These are like ANSI graphics. I love the KickBoxer graphic in the sports section and the mountains sun/clouds graphics. Ooh, a soccer graphic... I know, I'm a geek, but this is very cool!

 

[spongella]

All new to me, thanks for the post N5XZS, will try it out.

 

[Martyn]

That is awesome! I tuned to it today... I thought it was a 1 page thing, but there are pages and pages of information that you can jump through. You can use the red/green/yellow/blue keys to jump to different categories. Very cool. This is the first experience with TeleText.

Teletext was great and well ahead of its time.

You should be able to jump direct to pages by typing in the three-digit page ID. The colored labels at the bottom of the screen is a system called "Fast text" and it was a later development, so not all teletext TVs supported it when it came out.

Subtitles can be carried on teletext. In the UK, all the channels used page 888, which was a transparent page with just the subtitles showing at the bottom of the screen on a black background.

My favorite used to be the newsflash function on page 150 (Ceefax, the BBC service, and Oracle on ITV and Channel 4 all had it). You'd switch to teletext, set page 150 and it would be another transparent page. When big news happened, a box would pop up with a line saying what had happened.

This was in the 80s, way before Internet and mobile phones, so you could find out news fairly quickly.

During the day on BBC 2, before it was an all-day service, the BBC used to broadcast a cycle of teletext pages in-vision under the name "Pages from Ceefax." The music broadcast along with it generated a bit of a cult following:

I miss it, even though we have better ways to get the same information.

 

[analogqueen]

I wonder if we could build a 2nd generation Teletext for DVB FTA, and ATSC 3.0 by relieving the Internet traffic overload. Since it's one way broadcast to everyone's households by satellite and terrestrial TV "OTA".

With new better graphics and photos to be had with!!

The world has changes so much since the 80's and the 90's,so why not give the Teletext a new fresh look?

Ive the (very chap) SatHawk (sigh) which has TTXT button. I'll have to check it out later.